Mobile Web Continues to Grow

According to recent studies, mobile web usage is set to explode over the course of next few years due to market forces like the increase of iPhone and Android usage as well as the introduction of tablet computers such as Apple’s iPad. Below is a broad overview of some of those recent statistics.

• A Nielsen report says that 21 percent of wireless users in the US had a smartphone at the beginning of 2010, up from 14 percent at the beginning  of 2009. “Smartphones are expected to overtake feature phones in the US by early 2011.”

• There is now an estimated 45 million total smartphone users active in the US, with an overall mobile phone subscribership of 235 million.

• Browsers were used by 28.6 percent of all U.S. mobile subscribers.

• Forrester Research found that 17 percent of US adults used smartphones by the end of 2009, up from 11 percent in 2008 and 7 percent in 2007.

• The average number of applications installed on smartphones is 22, while feature phones have about 10. When broken down by OS, iPhone users had the most apps (37), followed by Android (22). BlackBerry users had an average of 10 apps, tying that OS with your average feature phone user.

• Facebook is the app most popular with American smartphone owners, followed by Google Maps and Weather applications.

• 30% of smartphone users accessed social networks via mobile browsers — this was up from 22.5% in 2009. Total social networking access via mobile browsers on all mobile phones rose to 11.1% — this was up from 6.5% in 2009. Most of this growth was in the uptick in smartphone usage. Twitter usage via mobile browsers was up 347% while Facebook mobile browser usage was up 112%. It’s important to note that these figures are just from mobile browser statistics — they don’t even take into account the use of mobile applications for Twitter or Facebook.

• 40 percent of smartphone users spend at least one hour a day using apps on their phone. And they don’t seem to mind ads in their apps: 76 percent would rather use a free app with advertising than pay for an ad-free version.

• 53 percent of users are happy to share their current location in exchange for relevant advertising, and 84 percent would be more likely to engage with an ad relevant to their current location.

• Mobile web access increased 36% among US broadband internet users during 2009.